On July 4th I neglected to put together anything for the blog, so to assuage my feelings of patriotic inadequacy, today we will discuss the word орёл eagle. The ё is a fleeting vowel, so the word declines like this:

The bald eagle is one of the symbols of the USA, and in Russian one of the names for it is белоголовый орлан, literally “the white-headed sea-eagle”:

Actually, in standard translations both the phrase «белоголовый орлан» and «aмериканский орёл» should be rendered “Bald Eagle,” but on this occasion I've rendered them in a more word-for-word fashion to point out how the phrases are constructed.

Of course the US is not the only country to use eagles in its symbology. Imperial Russia used the double-headed eagle «двуглавый орёл» on its coat of arms. The coat of arms of the current Russian Federation also uses the double-headed eagle.

Imperial Russian coat of arms (Courtesy of Wikipedia)	Russian Federation coat of arms (Courtesy of Wikipedia)